Month: July 2008

What They Call A “Mobile Chicane”

I just got back to the office, and my arms are sore enough that I can barely type.

We went to a nearby kart track for the afternoon as a “team-building exercise,” though the competition was pretty informal. Driving the karts was pretty fun, and a chance to exercise a bit of racing skills, but… a) it’s hell on your arms and wrists due to the grip and turning force you need to exert, so you don’t want to do too many laps at once, b) the track was rather bumpy, and c) based on the results, you definitely don’t want me on your team. Our team did manage to get second place, but it definitely wasn’t thanks to me.

Ah well, I do have a bit of a weight disadvantage… I’m just happy I didn’t spin out or crash.

Try, Try Again

I need to get back to losing weight again. Yeah, I was moderately successful at it once before, getting down to within 9 pounds of my target, but then some stress at the office and other things hit, I fell back into old habits, couldn’t exercise the way I’d gotten used to, etc., and eventually got right back to where I’d started.

But that was a couple years ago, and I’ve been moping around in my current condition for far too long, so it’s time to do something about it again. Roughly the same plan as before, as it was working fairly well (the main problem was psychological), with a couple twists:

1) I can’t really start out exercising like I did before, due to some complications, so I’ll be relying mostly on controlling food in order to kick off the weight loss until I reach a point where it’s more practical.

2) And in order to track food, I’m going to try using The Daily Plate, and you can even spy on what I’m eating here. It won’t be entirely accurate as you sometimes have to fudge or guess the numbers a bit (damned if I know the exact weight of the noodles in the Chinese food I had for lunch), or settle for a close match in their database, but it’s better than nothing.

Ha Ha, You Can’t Read This (Yet)

You never really realize how much you’ve come to depend on the Internet until you lose it for a while. It’s been really dodgy all weekend for me now, even as I write this (yay for hosting your own server).

So, maybe I should play a game. My current Diablo 2 character is level 26 on the USWest realm and OH WAIT. Well, I could play single-player. I don’t really want to build a character from scratch again though, so maybe I should go download the Atma editor and OH WAIT. Well, maybe I could play a class I haven’t really used much before, and see how it plays from the start. I’ll just check for a decent skill build on the Arreat Summit site and OH WAIT.

I can still watch TV though MythTV, at least. Some of the channel listing entries look a bit out of sync though. I should check that the lineup is right at schedulesdirect.org and OH WAIT. Oh well, I wonder what the other F1 thread guys thought about the race OH WAIT.

There is still some network activity getting through, but not enough to reliably connect to web sites and such. I’m curious as to what kind of traffic there is, so I could sniff it by getting the ‘tcpdump’ package, and Ubuntu will even download and install OH WAIT.

I even popped over to the office for a little while just to check some of my regular sites. Good thing it’s only a quick trip away. 99% of the time these problems resolve themselves, since they tend to affect large blocks of customers, but I’m not so sure this time.

Edit: Well, it seems to be partly working again, or at least some sites load (albeit slowly), though I still can’t get to some others. Only took 36 hours…

Edit Edit: And it’s dodgy again as of the morning. Woo.